Blog: TAPPED

CLINTON RULES. I have, over the past few months, found myself in the increasingly uncomfortable position of being one of the few people who writes for a lefty blog willing to say anything nice about Hillary Clinton. This is not because I have any special affection for Clinton, whom I have never met or interviewed, […]

PRISON RAPE. I’ve written about this before. Here’s a first-person account: When I first came to prison, I had no idea what to expect. Certainly none of this. I’m a tall white male, who unfortunately has a small amount of feminine characteristics. And very shy. These characteristics have got me raped so many times I […]

BILL RITTER IS A DELICATE FLOWER. A disappointing start for Colorado’s new governor, Bill Ritter, as he sides with business over labor in one of the first big bills of his term. What’s odd, though, isn’t that Ritter, mere days after business leaders fundraised their hearts out to retire his $250,000 in campaign debt, veoted […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NADER RECONSIDERED. Discussing the new documentary An Unreasonable Man, our own Robert Kuttner offers two cheers for Ralph Nader. –The Editors

DYNAMISM! Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that Europe’s relatively lackluster economic performance over the past few decades is not the fault of the social welfare state, but of an economy and culture ill-suited to entrepreneurship and dynamism. Particularly weird are these poll results he found: […]

WAYWARD DOWN SOUTH. Several Tapped commenters have asked me to respond to Bob Moser‘s recent piece in The Nation, “The Way Down South.” Logistics and schedules permitting, Bob and I will be debating his piece and related issues next month at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I will also have a short, 700-word […]

THE LOST RACE. One commonly articulated concern about Sen. Barack Obama‘s nascent presidential bid is that he has never faced a tough race for office before. That’s not quite true. In 2000, as the rest of America was focused on the contest between Bush and Gore, Obama lost a bid to unseat former Black Panther […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FIRST REJECTED, NOW DENIED. On Wednesday, Condoleezza Rice denied knowledge of a secret Iranian negotiating proposal from 2003. Gareth Porter, who wrote one of the definitive accounts of this offering, has her number in this brand new piece. Take a look. –The Editors

ROOM TO GROW. A lot of people dismiss Hillary Clinton‘s strength in national polls as name recognition and point to Iowa and New Hampshire polls as evidence that’s she’s actually quite weak. Well, the latest from Zogby shows that her presidential announcement — delivered online on a Saturday — was enough to bump her up […]

GIULIANI — “MELLOWER THAN MCCAIN?” As a New Yorker for most of the Rudy Giuliani era, it’s hard for me to see him as anything other than a vain and dangerous authoritarian. This goes back to his years as a prosecutor, when he invented the “perp walk” by which he shamed the minor Wall Streeters […]